


No Smoke Without Fire

by LelithSugar



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Family Feels, Love Confessions, M/M, New Relationship, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Romantic Fluff, rated for language and innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28341666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LelithSugar/pseuds/LelithSugar
Summary: There's high romance, and then there's being devastatingly head-over-heels for someone who's in the middle of trying to make their little sister's Nativity costume out of egg cartons and glitter glue.Harry's not an expert in childcare, ad hoc crafts or choosing his moments, as it turns out.
Relationships: Harry Hart | Galahad/Gary "Eggsy" Unwin
Comments: 43
Kudos: 107
Collections: Kingsman: The Secret Santa 2020





	No Smoke Without Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zebraljb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zebraljb/gifts).



> For darling Zebraljb, with my brightest blessings and warmest wishes for 2021. Thank you for keeping our fandom fed!
> 
> My prompt was nativity and the request was for confessions of love, and... here is where we ended up. It's been an odd Christmas but I've got an espressotini - let's do this.
> 
> (CW for world's briefest allusion to recreational cannabis use).

No Smoke Without Fire

“Thanks babe." Eggsy takes a grateful sip of his hot chocolate and his eyes widen when he registers the amount of cognac stirred into it, languishing innocently beneath a heart shape made out of mini marshmallows. " _ Thanks _ babe." 

“You’re welcome. And an unadulterated version for madam.”

“Fank you Harry.”

It’s drawing to the very end of Daisy’s first weekend-long sleepover at their home and Eggsy’s admirable ability to keep up with her boundless exuberance is just starting to frazzle around the edges. Granted, it comes hot on the end of a grueling ten day mission in Moscow but Harry’s quietly confident the exhaustion is far less to do with that and far more to do with the casual note from Daisy’s teacher that her costume for their upcoming Nativity play should be handmade, and that Daisy would be playing Dragon Number Four.

Now, look. Harry’s already received one indescribably withering look for daring to ask what role a dragon played in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and was absolutely not going to push his luck by asking why there were four of them. 

Eggsy had taken it on the chin, recalling his own star turn as a shepherd  _ “which was just literally a belted sheet and a checked tea towel on me ‘ead. Patently racist, and I’m pretty sure the tea towel had bolognaise on it.”  _ He wants better, of course, for his sister. His darling girl, blossoming so beautifully in the world he saved singularly for her, totally unaware; showing the shoots of being every bit as forthright and clever and charming as her brother. 

It would be a stretch to say it’s made Harry broody: he’s never wanted children, his patience is waning and after two weeks in the field, starved of their still-novel intimacy, it would be nice to be able to get into bed with Eggsy without a full set of pyjamas on at the very least. Still, he finds he can’t quite get irritated. He can get over tired. He can get confused, by how many times in a row it’s necessary to watch A Muppet Christmas Carol - though from the singing, he suspects that might be for Eggsy’s benefit - and he can get punted in the giblets by a tiny sparkly trainer when she attempt her own bit of parkour over him to get to the dog but he cannot find it within himself to be annoyed, somehow. Daisy is adorable, and the way Eggsy dotes after her even moreso. 

It’s certainly done nothing to shake Harry’s unsettlingly deep, all-encompassing fondness for the boy. Their relationship has been built around precocious commitment, in a way, just falling together as the dust settled; they play at families very well too, if this weekend is any indication, and it nurtures the feeling that they’ve been together far longer. It just feels right. Harry knows he shouldn't think it, but he does nonetheless, because he's a besotted old fool like that.

Stoked by hot cocoa and oblivious to Herry’s reverie, production continues. Michelle is due to pick Daisy up within the next couple of hours and so the deadline for their little craft project is looming; the egg box, milk carton and paper mache head has dried nicely - an old episode of Art Attack on youtube can be thanked for that, it was surprisingly informative - and Eggsy is busy daubing a scale effect on using gold glitter, a kitchen sponge and an old pair of fishnet tights. The  _ I have questions about this when there isn't a five year old present  _ expression prompted by the tights had looked to be of the favourable sort, as far as Harry could tell, and the finishing touches to the dragon's head are really coming together, so he would tentatively call his Sunday afternoon a success.

...albeit he feels that Daisy is not giving Eggsy's ability to conjure her a costume out of the contents of their recycling bin and a frantic trip to Hobbycraft quite the credit it deserves. 

"Make it so it really breathes fire!"

"I can't, darlin'." Technically he probably could, but what's possible for a pair of special agents and what's sensible for a primary school theatre production are presumably two different things. Harry wouldn't call himself an expert. 

" _ You  _ can make smoke come out of your nose."

"Used to babe, used to. We don't do that no more." The rest he says out of the side of his mouth: a mumble to Harry or perhaps just to himself. "And I ain't gonna be very popular if I rig a bong up to your headgear."

“But without fire it’s just a dinosaur!”

She may actually have them, there. 

“Huh, well, there’s only one thing for it, ain't there." Eggsy dives for the box of Quality Street on the coffee table, and brandishes the purple tub aloft dramatically before upending it onto the tea tray with a flourish. "We've got to eat all the fire coloured ones, and save the wrappers."

"We could always unwrap them and put them in a Tupperware..."

"Yeah alright, if you wanna be boring. I was looking forward to watching you cram twelve chocolate Brazils in your mouth, you love a mouthful of nuts.”

It’s been a recurring theme of the weekend: Eggsy is a lot more confident than Harry with what will fly straight over the head of a five year old, but- 

"Peanuts!" Harry almost has heart failure until realising he’s misheard. "Molly's 'lergic to nuts! We're not allowed Nutella anymore."

"That's right! Because she could get really sick. Good girl."

He ruffles her hair, thankfully seems to think better do pushing the nut-based innuendo any further, and trots off on the hunt for more craft supplies. Harry isn't even subtle about leaning back so that he can watch him jog up the stairs - what's that old classic? Hates to see him leave, loves to watch him go? Eggsy has been eating so much better since they moved in together and he's getting more gorgeous as he fills out, not that Harry would have said that was possible if you’d asked. 

It might be the Corvoisier, or the soft suffusion of the fairy lights but when Eggsy reappears - flushed from ferreting around in the airing cupboard for the wire coat hangers he's dangling from his fingers - he might be the most beautiful man Harry has ever known. 

He sits down cross legged on the carpet and pushes his sleeves up - and don’t think for a moment that the sudden baring of his forearms from underneath his _“Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal”_ jumper doesn’t have the same swoon-inducing potential as the flash of an ankle might’ve to their nineteenth century ancestors - to get to work on making exactly what Daisy’s heart desires. Maybe there’s something to his resourcefulness and determination that’s making Harry weak at the knees, too: in absence of what his loved one wants, Eggsy will think up a way to make it with his bare hands. 

His accuracy with a glue gun turns out not to be quite up to his ordinary marksmanship, but he’d been considerate enough to put newspaper underneath and the way he pokes his tongue into the corner of his mouth more than makes up for it. Daisy adorned him with one of her hair slides several hours ago, and he repositions it to keep his hair from falling into his eyes whilst he manipulates the wire into a flame shape and wraps the cellophane around before painstakingly gluing it into place.

“Pass us the red one?” Eggsy holds his hand forward and Harry puts the sweet wrapper between his grasping fingers. “Cheers, darlin’.” When he looks up his smile sparkles, his eyes crinkling with either pride in his creation or delight at the absurdity of the whole scene, something of mirth and mischief that just lights him up from within.

"I love you."

Harry hears it before he realises he's said it, and then everything dissolves into ringing silence, like a grenade's gone off, as Eggsy stares at him. 

Harry doesn’t know what’s come over him. He doesn’t know why he’s said it, or why his mouth was able to function without any input from his brain on this occasion but he does know one doesn’t blurt love at millennials a couple of scant months into a relationship, even if it has been true for a year. 

"You… Oh fuck I've just hot glued my finger, shit, ouch." Eggsy holds the other hand up for pause whilst he sucks on his burned knuckle joint, "and now I've got glue in my mouth, fucking fuck's sake - "

"Fuck sake!" 

"Daise, no. Harry, I - fucking hell. Hold that thought. " He stands up. "Daise, I've got to get a plaster and finish this. Why don't you go show JB Paw Patrol on your iPad?" 

Daisy merrily skitters off with her tablet to find the dog, who quite sensibly has retreated to the bedroom for most of the weekend. Harry stands as though surrounded by laser trip wires whilst he listens to Eggsy swearing and spitting in the kitchen. His mind is, unusually, silent of criticism for his misstep or ways to dig his idiot way out of it, preferring instead to provide him with total blankness to the white noise of the running of the tap. At most, a discordant feedback sound and that card with the girl writing on a chalkboard they used to put on television when the transmission malfunctioned. What on earth has he done?

Eggsy returns - which is the first relief, that he hasn’t done a bunk out of the kitchen window - with a tea towel around his hand and his eyes down. His cheeks are pink as he walks up to Harry, picking his way around craft supplies and errant dog biscuits until he’s standing close enough to whisper, close enough to touch without even really lifting his hands. Harry’s heart seizes madly, because he daren’t, but wouldn’t Eggsy be keeping his distance if Harry has freaked him out?

"You mean it?"

The tug Harry feels is Eggsy’s fingers tucking through his belt loops. The other is hope.

"Mm. I can shut up about it, if it makes you uncomfortable, but I'm not going to lie to your face and say I don't." But he knows before he’s even finished the sentence that’s not where it’s headed, because Eggsy is pulling him closer by the hips, pressing them together until he has to tilt his chin up to look Harry in the eyes. 

"Nah, none of that. Say it properly, when I ain't up to my elbows in sweet wrappers and glitter glue." And just like that the tension bursts into confetti, into the flutter of butterfly wings.

"I love you."

"I love you, Harry." A slow spreading smile and Eggsy closes their lips together for the softest, quickest kiss. “Been waiting on you to say it ‘cause… well, I know what people think and I ain’t had much in the way of relationships but I know how I feel. And you don’t fall like this just ‘cos you don’t know any better. The way I feel with you... I never felt nothing like it, and I don't reckon I ever would, and I can feel you feel it too." His lips close against Harry's again and Harry is grateful for the break in the electricity of the eye contact, a moment's reprieve from the suffocating intensity of its potential. "This is the big one, ain't it?" 

“I rather feel it might be.” 

“Now, let’s finish off a dragon and keep this," - a last drag of lips, teasing at teeth - "for when Daise has gone home.”

“I think she’s quite engrossed in Paw Patrol…”

“Yeah, for just about long enough to lull you into a false sense of security. And I don’t want her learnin’ no more new words this weekend.”

In hindsight, bringing up the decapitation of Ann Boleyn was regrettable but Harry’s working knowledge of princess stories is  _ extremely limited _ and he’s not convinced it’s any more brutal than Frozen. He’s been reeling from that plot twist for a good 36 hours.

Eggsy composes himself before he calls Daisy back to the living room to watch him check his finished flame creations and unceremoniously jam the ends into the nostrils of the dragon mask. The effect is… oddly convincing, actually, quite artistic in a Rennie Mackintosh sort of way, and certainly elevates the entire look.

“There! What do you reckon?”

“THANKS Essy!” She throws herself into a hug hard enough to barrel him back into the sofa and Eggsy lets himself collapse, reaching out for Harry’s hand to draw him down beside him whilst he cuddles his sister onto his lap. She snuggles immediately into his shoulder, suddenly exhausted, and who can blame her? “Love you.”

“I love you too, munchkin.” it’s so satisfying to know that it’s coming; to hope that it’s coming as Eggsy turns his attention to Harry, and his voice softens, his eyes hazy. “I love you.”

Harry is about to get to say it,  _ in return _ for the very first time, but is interrupted by a very familiar petulant stomp of the foot from Daisy.

“Heyyy! Not 'sposed to say Eggsy loves Harry!”

It takes Harry a moment to gather that into anything that makes sense, and by the time he’s figured it out Eggsy’s rubbing at the back of his neck and looking mortified. 

“Hah, yeah, uh. She picked that one up about a month ago and it has cost me  _ a fortune _ in Kinder Eggs to bribe her not to say it in front of you." He tickles her under the chin, managing to avoid eye contact whilst that particular revelation settles. With the surety of hindsight it's all so correct, so plainly _right_ that none of it is surprising, but hearing it confirmed stokes something new and wonderful. If the pink on Eggsy's cheeks is anything to go by, he's enjoying the feeling too. 

"It’s okay, love, you can say it now." She’s too drowsy to process that this means her supply of Kinder Eggs is about to dry up and just nods happily against his shoulder, leaving Eggsy to grin at Harry, slow and with all the warmth of home. "Because he does." 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> A belated Merry Christmas all!   
> Any hearts and comments will be enormously appreciated. Like most, I'm finding creativity exceptionally hard right now and I love hearing from you.


End file.
